Poetry: Inferno
One of poetry’s many superpowers is the ability to lend a voice to the dearly departed. “Inferno” allows Melanie Trinidad one last moment to speak to her beloveds, who survived the fire that took her life. In the last breath…
Category: Poetry
Poetry: November in the National Gallery
So much of our day to day lives are governed by the small and urgent gifts of longing–a lover leaving a shirt behind from the night before, walking around a park and watching the world shift from one season to…
Poetry: Fugitive
What is the language of a fugitive? And who deems who someone marked by such a name? Through erasure, Smith moves through these questions, navigating what it means to be a woman, a body at odds with the state for…
Poetry: Emile
In 1962, welterweight champion Emile Griffiths goes toe-to-toe with Benny “Kid” Paret in Madison Square Garden. The air is filled with salt and sweat and shouts as the fight roars on. Losing the fight, Kid called Emile a “fa**ot”. A…
Poetry: THE HOTTENTOT LIGHTS THE GAS HERSELF
The poet Nayyirah Waheed said once, “all the women. in me. are tired” and if all those women could speak at once, they would be this very poem. Embodying the state of fatigue, the speaker moves their readers through the…
Poetry: for coming forth into the day
A poem that effortlessly blurs the lines between dreamscape and the waking world, what is divine and what is commonplace, the speaker invokes echoes of Sappho through this piece woven as elegantly as a fine tapestry. The speaker situates themselves…
Poetry: Patti LaBelle & Celia Cruz (Alma Awards, 1998)
The year is 1998 and you are front row at the Alma Awards. Patti LaBelle dressed in a flattering hi-low black dress, 6-inch heels, says into the mic, “I will always remember tonight as the evening I was privileged to…
Poetry: Self-Portrait as Verbal Reasoning Test
In O Leary’s inventive self-portrait, the pathways of memory splinter themselves into a series of analogies as both a coping mechanism and as a means for its readers to see the poem’s events from various vantage points. A daughter’s fraught…
Poetry: Mississippi Genesis
A poem after the invented form of poet Amanda Johnston, the speaker tale spans of five generations told as a collective, disjointed account of history across the Mississippi landscape. Without a clear vision of their future but an unrelenting spirit…
New Voices Contest, 1st Place Winner: Small and Personal by Donte Collins
Of the 2022 New Voices Contest first place winner, the judge José Olivarez states, “Donte Collins’s poem SMALL & PERSONAL has a magnetic voice. There’s no hesitation here: the poem moves from questions of violence to 10th grade civics to love…
